On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the final liquidation of Kraków Ghetto, on 13 March 1943, and the deportation of the last remaining Jewish prisoners to Plaszow and Auschwitz concentration camps, the Presidium of the International Auschwitz Committee gathered for a meeting in Kraków.

From March 1941 until March 1943 there were 15,000 Jewish people packed together in the Kraków Ghetto in the district of Podgorze where previously 3,000 people had lived. They were forcibly housed there under insufferable living conditions. The entrances to the ghetto were heavily guarded, and during the ghetto’s existence there were repeated deportations to the concentration and extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Belzec. Former prisoners in the ghetto included the Jewish costume designer Roma Ligocki, who today lives in Munich and has recorded her memories of the ghetto in numerous books. Her cousin Roman Liebling was also there. He later became internationally famous as the film director Roman Polanski. At nine years of age he managed to escape from the ghetto on 13 March 1943 and hide in various places with non-Jewish families in Kraków. Roman Polanski survived the Holocaust. His mother was murdered in Auschwitz.

In the summer of 1942 the voice of one of the greatest poets of the Jewish people was silenced in Kraków Ghetto: at the age of 65 Mordechai Gebirtig was shot dead by a German soldier on a ghetto street during a roundup for deportation. To this day his poem "Es brennt, Brüder es brennt" (It’s burning, brothers! Our town is burning!) remains one of the most powerful testimonies to the world of persecution and an inspiration for resistance. Speaking on this Remembrance Day in Kraków, where survivors and their relatives gathered from Poland, Israel, Belgium, Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany, the Auschwitz survivor and President of the International Auschwitz Committee, Marian Turski stressed:

“As we join together today with many citizens of Kraków to walk this Memory Trail from the ghetto to the former Plaszow concentration camp, then we are also walking this path for all the people who today, and on our very doorstep, are again being forced to suffer under the effects of war, hatred, anti-Semitism and indifference. In all the years since our liberation, the words of our murdered poet Mordechai Gebirtig have never resounded more loudly in our ears: It’s burning, brothers! Our town is burning! We hope, on this day in particular, that the world will listen to his call against indifference and heed his voice!”